Project Background
Cope’s rule suggests that body size tends to increase along evolutionary lineages. This principle was first proposed by American anatomist and palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope in his 1887 work, The Origin of the Fittest: Essays on Evolution. Known for his prolific output of over 1,300 publications, Cope’s productivity was partly fuelled by his intense rivalry with fellow palaeontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. This decades-long competition, known as the “Bone Wars,” centred on naming new Palaeocene vertebrate species from North America. During this period, Cope observed a trend toward larger body sizes among North American Palaeocene mammals, attributing it to a tendency for new groups to start small, with larger sizes providing evolutionary advantages. Subsequent research on Cope’s rule has produced mixed findings. Some studies support an actively driven trend of size increase, while others find little support. Gould (1997) proposed that much of the evidence supporting Cope’s rule may result from sampling bias and other issues. He noted that many studies focus on short time spans, limited sample sizes, or lack clear ancestor-descendant relationships for direct comparison. Gould argued that a more rigorous approach would involve studying complete lineages within large clades over significant geological periods. However, the fossil record is often too incomplete to allow for such an analysis, requiring a comprehensive species-level phylogeny and sufficient ancestry-descent pairs for statistical validity. This project will make use of the exemplary fossil record of the planktonic foraminifera, microscopic single-celled marine organisms with calcareous shells that float in the ocean’s surface waters and serve as important indicators of past and present climate and environmental conditions. This project extends beyond testing Cope's Rule, however, and the data collection methods will enable testing of various evolutionary hypotheses, which the student will be encouraged to help formulate early in the project.
